The next Federal Election in Australia will be held on Saturday 21st May. Will the incumbent government be returned or a new government be formed? Well what can I say? Clearly, the propaganda wars have begun as both sides spread lies, half-truths, and fanciful narratives.
I well remember my time in the bunker of an Australian Election Campaign where I was cast as "the outsider" to my team [see photo]. Looking at my team I spied a huge bubble of "groupthink" and an intense "fear of failure". Because I never became part of my team's "groupthink" I never developed the fear that my team would lose [indeed, they won in a landslide]. What I saw was countless examples of poor, bad, and irrational decision making. I also saw what you likely see everyday at your workplace - incompetence.
My anatomy of an Election Campaign is simple. The whole exercise is about marketing and selling a narrative. And the successful Campaigns always have a three word mantra. "Stop the boats" was a classic example of a winning mantra in Australia. That mantra summed up what the electors thought about the complex maze of issues such as the people smugglers, the numbers of women/kids/men perishing at sea in small boats, and the legal rights of non-citizens seeking comfort and shelter in Australia. In addition, that mantra played on the long-held fears of Australians who live on a vast continent with a small population [approximately 26 million] that they will be overrun by illegal immigrants. Any such deep-seated fear in the electorate is gold for an Election Campaign to exploit. For instance a loss of government services or public subsidies; any type of new tax on work, any sign of weak attention to detail on National Security, etc. So the most important task at Campaign headquarters is to decide what the mantra will be [not an easy decision to make because the "groupthink" inside the team lowers the capacity for any type of risk taking] and how best to propagate it.
Because the team inside Campaign HQ has the attention span of a "gnat fly" there is meeting, upon meeting, upon meeting about trivial issues. The type of conversations that prevail inside our Campaign Bubble are those that one might expect on a pub crawl executed just before closing time. These discussions focus on perceptions not on realities. For example a winning Campaign will ignore changing perceptions because they commit a huge portion of their budget to advertising the other team's weakest link. In our Campaign the team decided to spend a fortune on two themes: the leader of the other team [full page ads featuring the leader of the other mob without comment] and our team's promises to give tax money back to the electorate [after being re-elected they actually increased taxes].
In sum... Election Campaigns are won by the team who are best at propagating the "big lie". This team will shuck-off the natural "groupthink" of political advisors and stick to a narrative which they settle on after an in-depth analysis of the cross-tabs of polls on the key issues [for instance... it is the incumbent's mismanagement of public policy or is it a belief in the future possibilities of new public policy settings]. Election Campaigns are either great dramatic theatre or a pantomime laced with fanciful dialogue [good, bad, and ugly] followed by a shower of sweets thrown from the stage with some landing in the back rows.
Richard.
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